I know that I shouldn’t read too much into any particular aspect of a set of interviews of just twelve people, but nonetheless I find it interesting that the three people “strongly opposed” to the loss of the term Asperger’s in diagnostic manuals were late-diagnosed men. There’s a thread of autistic opinion out there which rightfully gets labelled Aspie Supremacy (typically it seemed to be people with desperate need to establish that they aren’t like those other autistic people), and almost every time I’ve encountered it directly it’s been late-diagnosed men. Which is not to say that only men identify as Aspies; just that I’d actually love to know if there’s any research on use of the term broken down by gender, as well as the degree of vehemency.
Addenda
- What I mean here is that in my mind, men are more likely than women to be strongly opposed to a loss of status, whether real or perceived, and “Aspie” frequently seems used not so much in the framework of disability identity theory as in the framework of a higher status of autistic.